Every day, on average more than two million magazines and catalogues are gathered by Burda Druck and, depending on the customer's requirements, are provided with inserts, samples, CDs, stitch-ins or postcards before being addressed, stitched or otherwise enhanced.

The UniDrum gatherer-stitcher line was installed at Burda Druck subsidiary Ortenauer Papierverarbeitung GmbH (OPV). It has brought a clear boost in productivity, and the company talks of a 25 percent rise in net output with a simultaneous reduction in staffing levels – which in turn has a positive impact on costs per copy. The gatherer-stitcher line has six infeeds, of which five are fed off logs. With repeat jobs, the operator is supported by PreTronic, in order to preset the format on the UniDrum automatically using saved job data. Depending on the job, set-up times have been reduced by between 15 and 20 percent.

Application of samples has become an important form of advertising for Hubert Burda Media. A TriServer-350-SAM with magazine feed was also acquired with the new UniDrum. The new generation unit brings a 30-percent increase in efficiency when processing gimmicks, and this has a knock-on benefit for the output of the installation as a whole. The stitched signatures are then trimmed on an SNT-50, and two further supplements can be added via an EasySert.

When it comes to performance as well as staffing and technical costs, the new gatherer-stitcher line has matched expectations in full. Costs per copy have thus also moved in the desired direction, and OPV can now consider further plans to invest in its finishing operations.